While working in the studio I often find myself repeating gestures and movements that my mother made while sizing me for a dress. She would stand me up on a chair in the dining room and smooth pieces of pattern paper across my body, pulling out all the moments - the two-inch too short torso, the extra wide hips – that made my body different from an average sized person. Standing still on the chair was hard but what was harder was finding out just how many inches separated me from other people.

What made that experience memorable though and worthwhile was the extra attention she gave me. With her touching and her measuring I came to understand that the oddities of my body were something special and sought after, something worth caring for and accommodating. Often times when I’m in the studio I feel my mothers hands tracing unabashedly across my back and through my hands and it reinforces everything I learned from her about myself, and about working.

She taught me quiet things about bedding - about all the places we sleep and make love, give birth and die. She showed me how to make and mend the pieces of fabric that have enfolded my body during every significant moment of my life.

All of her lessons came full circle, in a way, when she was on her deathbed. When my mother lay dying, her body failing from old age, I noticed a hole in the blanket that covered her. I sat and mended it because somehow that was the only way to show her that it was ok to die. Just as her measurements taught me that the uniqueness of my body was something to take pride in, mending that blanket and smoothing it over her shape seemed somehow to reinforce an old notion that death isn’t the end of life but its completion.

These days, increased wealth has brought me into contact with the idea that things are purchased instead of fixed. As it stands, I generally just buy new things when old ones break and I’ve found that my platform for making and fixing things is now in the studio. Of late, the focus of my drawings and installations has become more and more directed towards finding the oddities and holes in my relationship to the world around me and measuring, fitting, dressing and mending them in anyway I can.